No, you are not getting away with Section 28 again

The following is a rant that I wrote on Facebook in reaction to a news story about protests against LGBT inclusive education. As such it is not as structured as my other blog posts.

No, you don’t get to decide when your kids are “exposed” to us existing. We live in the same world, and queer people exist. The media and politicians and all the homophobes and transphobes are building to another Section 28 to ban schools from even acknowledging that we exist and you are not fucking doing that again. Gay parents exist. Trans parents exist. Gay KIDS exist. All you are doing is reinforcing to those kids how gross you think they are.

All I knew of gay and trans people growing up was the disgust expressed by the christians around me, the shock headlines in the sun about how depraved we are, the insults from other kids at school. Now there are bigots protesting outside schools because they admit that some people aren’t straight or cisgender. How do you think those kids feel going through the protests to get to school? What do you think it does to the ones who have realised they might not be straight or cis? What the fuck do you think it does to people who haven’t yet realised? I took TWENTY YEARS to get past the bigotry inflicted on me and accept that I am a transgender lesbian.